Workpieces, including food products, are cut or otherwise portioned into smaller portions by processors in accordance with customer needs. Also, excess fat, bone, and other foreign or undesired materials are routinely trimmed from food products. It is usually highly desirable to portion and/or trim the workpieces into uniform sizes, for example, for steaks to be served at restaurants or chicken fillets used in frozen dinners or in chicken burgers. Much of the portioning/trimming of workpieces, in particular food products, is now carried out with the use of high-speed portioning machines. These machines use various scanning techniques to ascertain the size and shape of the food product as it is being advanced on a moving conveyor. This information is analyzed with the aid of a computer to determine how to most efficiently portion the food product into optimum sizes. For example, a customer may desire chicken breast portions in two different weight sizes, but with no fat or with a limited amount of acceptable fat. The chicken breast is scanned as it moves on a conveyor belt and a determination is made through the use of a computer as to how best to portion the chicken breast to the weights desired by the customer, so as to use the chicken breast most effectively.
Portioning and/or trimming of the workpiece can be carried out by various cutting devices, including high-speed water jet cutters or rotary or reciprocating blades, as the food product continues to travel on the conveyor. Once the portioning/trimming has occurred, the resulting portions are off-loaded from the conveyor by hand to be placed on a second takeaway conveyor for further processing or, perhaps, to be placed in a storage bin. The manual off-loading of portioned pieces is often unsatisfactory because it is difficult for the worker to visually distinguish between portions that might vary by only a few ounces. As a result, the portioned piece may be placed onto the wrong conveyor or into the wrong storage bin. Also, the portioning of food products, especially fish, poultry or meat, typically occurs at relatively low temperatures, in the range of 40 degrees. Performing the same repetitive off-loading tasks in this cold environment can lead to physical ailments as well as creating an undesirable work environment. As such, relatively high worker turnover is not uncommon.
Automated systems have been developed for picking up portioned pieces and offloading the portioned pieces into a second takeaway conveyor, a takeaway chute, a storage bin, etc. Such offloading systems are located downstream of the location of the portioning/trimming cutters. Oftentimes, a significant number of offloader units are required to keep pace with the portioning/trimming cutters when seeking to maximize throughput. Also, a separately activated carrier system is used for the offloading units.
The present invention seeks to increase the accuracy (and thereby reduce the level of human error) with which cut portions are categorized and also potentially to increase the throughput of portioning machines while at the same time keeping the equipment requirements of such machines to a minimum. The present disclosure also seeks to provide flexibility to change or alter the number of portioning cutters and/or offloader units to better match the types of portioning occurring, including the number of portions being cut from a workpiece. It will be appreciated that if two breast pieces are cut from a chicken breast, the offloading requirements are not nearly as onerous as opposed to if the chicken breast is being cut into nuggets, resulting in numerous nuggets per chicken breast workpiece.